The success of the Remington Standard No. 2 typewriter in 1878, which used the QWERTY keyboard, led to the universal adoption of the QWERTY layout. It was an open design and is hailed as one of the successful examples of open standards for an industry. This layout was designed to slow down the rate of typing of the operator. The early mechanical system could not keep up with the rate the keys were being struck. The operator could press keys in sequence faster than the machine could return the previous key to its starting position. There was no consideration given to the ease of learning the keyboard.
The QWERTY keyboard was arranged to scatter the most struck keys to slow down the speed of the operator. For instance, a frequently pressed vowel “a” is pressed by the small finger of the left hand, which is a weak finger and the mechanical typewriters of the time required a forceful stroke to bring the key up to strike the ribbon and make an impression. The QWERTY keyboard was laid out in three rows with 10 keys in the top row, 9 in the second row, and 7 in the third row, with the keys arranged in diagonal columns to allow the keys to depress a lever.
However, the QWERTY keyboard did have one significant design feature: efficiency. The design of the keyboard with three rows with 10 letters in the first row, 9 letters in the second row and 7 letters in the third row. This created a middle home row for the fingers to rest and then every key is then either in the home row, or one row up or one row down.
The QWERTY keyboard to a beginning typist is completely random and each letter has to be painfully memorized by repetition. It takes weeks if not months to train a typist to a high level of skill. Despite this significant limitation, the ubiquitous presence of the QWERTY keyboard on all typewriters made changing to an easier to learn system commercially unfeasible.
Typists were regarded as high skill employees and typing speed and accuracy was considered a desirable feature of employees. Subsequently, there was a search for a faster keyboard. August Dvorak was granted U.S. Pat. No. 2,040,248 (1936) for a new keyboard. The Dvorak keyboard was designed for maximum speed by carefully measuring the distance the operator had to go to type each letter. Ease of learning the keyboard was not considered. Again, to a beginning typist the keyboard was a random arrangement of letters and the finger to type each letter had to be learned by rote and extensive practice. The Dvorak keyboard layout comprised, from top to bottom, 7, 10 and 9 keys in each of three rows. This differentiated it from the QWERTY design of three rows of 10, 9, and 7 keys. The Dvorak keyboard never made significant headway for typewriters because the marginal difference in speed was more than negated by the long period of training necessary to change from one random arrangement of letters to another random arrangement of letters.
Starting in the 1970's with the introduction of the personal computer, the typing keyboard was separated from the physical computer. The QWERTY keyboard arrangement was adopted by manufacturers for the computer keyboards. Once again, the slight advantage in speed provided by the Dvorak keyboard did not make up for the long learning time. The Dvorak keyboard remains available for computers but only occupies an insignificant share of the market.
Thus, the main keyboard layouts had as their central concern the speed of the typist and developed their systems in response to this concern, but they had opposite goals. The intention of the QWERTY system was to slow down typing speed while the Dvorak system was to speed up typing. The Dvorak and QWERTY designers never paid any consideration to the difficulty of learning the keyboard layout. To a new learner of the keyboard layout, both the QWERTY and Dvorak systems appear as random arrangements that must be painstakingly learned through repetition.
In a study of computer users, the average typing rate was thirty-three words per minute to transcribe a document and the rate for composition was nineteen words per minute. This indicates that the overwhelming majority of computer users are not typing at any great rate of speed. Therefore, improving anyone's rate of typing from sixty-five to seventy words per minute for a skilled typist by having the typist learn a completely new keyboard arrangement is not a worthwhile endeavor that offsets the disability in quickly learning the keyboard. In contrast, providing a keyboard that is easier to learn and easier to use would provide a significant savings in learning times for beginning typists and aid slow typists.
Over the decades typing has changed from a skilled trade of secretarial work to a mass skill such as driving a car. Today, children in grade school learn keyboarding skills in the seventh grade, if not earlier. The mass use of cell phones and computers has made using a keyboard almost universal for all professions. Thus, the QWERTY keyboard system's random arrangement of letters now presents an even greater barrier and considerable waste of time, effort and money learning a keyboard layout meant for a mechanical keyboard of the 1900's.
Based on the above, there exists a need in the art for a keyboard arrangement of letters that enable the beginning learner and any user to quickly and efficiently identify the position of each of the letters on the keyboard. In order to accomplish this, the letters must be arranged in a manner that takes into account the learned knowledge of the user, that is, the learned order of the alphabetic sequence of letters and the distinction between the vowels and the consonants.